Being a mother in the US is tough, even for the multi-hyphenate singer, business leader, and self-made billionaire fashion mogul. Despite the access and resources that status brings, Rihanna is still not immune to the challenges of finding a work-life balance.
“It’s so different,” Rihanna said of postpartum life at the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show press conference on Thursday. “Balance is almost impossible because no matter how you look at it, work will always take away time with children. That’s the currency now, that’s where it’s going. How big is it.”
While Rihanna hasn’t released a new album or gone on tour since 2016, she headlined Sunday’s 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show. And she has spent years working hard to build a business empire from Fenty Beauty, a cosmetics brand, and Savage x Fenty, a lingerie brand. Last year, she gave birth to a baby boy with A$AP Rocky (whose name is still unknown). When the stars and businesswomen are likely to have hired help for caretaking, it seems that they are reckoning with the age-old pressure of “doing everything” and the mental openness that comes with running a business and a family.
In that sense, the “Work” singer is like many high-powered women who talk about the difficulty of juggling work (work, work, work) with making time for their children. Despite the increase in women entering the workforce since the 1950s, caregiving responsibilities are still often taken up, meaning their plates are only getting fuller.
“No one has more than 24 hours in a day,” says Misty Heggeness, a professor of public affairs at the University of Kansas. fortune. “If your work increases in one area, it should decrease in another.”
About two-thirds of working women in the U.S. with one or more direct reports say they have hired someone to take some of the caregiving weight off their shoulders (from grocery delivery services to childcare and cleaning services), according to a fortune a poll of about 400 high-powered women created with The Muse and Fairygodboss. But there is a stigma around admitting it.
“Maybe professionally, it’s more acceptable to ask for help, to delegate. But I think as women, we often look at our personal lives and feel like we have to do everything,” Molly McAllister, chief medical officer and senior vice president of veterinary affairs that provides outsourcing services to live in the house is smoother. smoothly, to Fortune’s Megan Leonhardt.
Finding work-life balance can be more difficult for women in non-executive positions, who may not earn high enough salaries to pay for child support or childcare. Unpaid labor and childcare costs have led many women to leave the workforce. About 4.5 million Americans were unemployed in January because they care for children who do not attend daycare programs or school.
“I love my job and would like to have a professional life again, but the costs, logistics, and the big possibilities have to be personal. [working] on set hours, it makes everything unrealistic,” Jennifer Parks, a former pharmaceutical manufacturing employee, told Leonhardt.
While Rihanna’s upcoming Super Bowl performance indicated that she won’t be leaving the workforce any time soon, the burden of leaving a child is a factor when making career decisions. “When you make a decision about what you’re going to say yes to, you should do it,” Rihanna said at a press conference.
He admitted that taking the halftime slot was “definitely” worth it; after all, it will likely boost his career as a music artist and put all of Rihanna’s business on display.
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